Sermon Transcript

0:00:14.0

All right.  Good morning, everybody.  Let’s take our Bibles and turn to John 4.  And we’ll continue in worship with some reading from scripture beginning in verse 19.  “The woman said to him, ‘Sir, I perceive that you are a prophet.  Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you say that in Jerusalem is the place where people ought to worship.’  Jesus said to her, ‘Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father.  You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship him.  God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.’”

0:01:18.0

I’ve titled this morning’s message, “The True Worshippers.”  Let’s pray together.  Our Father, thank You for our time together in Your house.  And thank You for this worship experience that we get to have as Your people.  I pray that every word that I speak, I pray that every mediation in our heart would be pleasing to You and would be worthy to bring as worship into Your presence this morning.   Would You open up our eyes to see and our ears to hear what you would say to us by your Holy Spirit this morning?  Be our teacher and guide us into all truth.  And help us to learn not just what it means to be true worshippers intellectually, but, Father, in everyday life and in everyday practice.  And pray this in Jesus’s name and for His sake, amen.

0:02:25.6

Well, this is week two of a brand-new series we started last week titled “True Worship.”  And last week we started at the base of Mount Sinai, if you remember, where Moses brought down the Ten Commandments.  We didn’t look at all Ten Commandments.  We looked at the first two commandments.  The first two commandments of worship, we called them.  And by way to reminder, we learned that first we must worship God exclusively, right?  “No other gods before Me,” the Lord said.  And secondly, we’re to worship God in response to His revelation of Himself, not in response to how we imagine Him to be.  Thus the command, “No carved images.”

0:03:04.6

Where we’re going from this point forward is to look at various stories and vignettes of different kinds of worshipers in the scriptures.  We’re going to look at the transformed worshipper found in Romans 12.  Then we’ll go to Isaiah 6 in a week or two and talk about the ruined worshipper.  Isaiah was caught up into that heavenly worship experience in Isaiah 6 where he heard the angels say, “Holy, holy, holy.”  And he says, “Woe is me, for I am ruined.  I am undone.”  And then we’re going to go to Proverbs 30.  And I’m going to introduce you to a guy that’s a little-known character in scripture named Agur.  And you’ve probably heard of the prayer of Jabez, but have you ever heard of the prayer of Agur?  He is a content worshipper.  He prays, “Lord, give me neither poverty nor wealth.”  He is just a content kind of guy as he worships the Lord even in his giving.

0:04:03.5

But today I want to talk about the true worshiper.  You really can’t approach the subject of worship in scripture without landing in John 4.  It contains a familiar story to many of us, to those who are familiar with the scriptures.  But it also contains one of the most significant conversations Jesus had about the subject of worship.  What makes it familiar is that story where Jesus finds Himself in Samaria.  And He’s having a conversation with a woman around a watering well.  We call her the Samaritan woman.  And that conversation, although it doesn’t start in the place of worship, it ends up there.  And Jesus talks about what it means to be a true worshipper.

0:04:51.0

Let me give you the big idea of this message this morning, and that’s this.  That God is seeking.  He is seeking after true worshippers in the least likely places and from the least worthy people.  Let me say that again.  God is seeking after true worshippers in the least likely places and from the least worthy people.  And that should be an encourage to every one of us here.  You may find yourself in the least likely place.  And you may consider yourself to be the least worthy person to be in the presence of God worshipping Him.

0:05:28.3

Let me give you an overview of John 4, kind of a 30,000-foot overview.  One of things of find fascinating about this section of scripture is that when Jesus wanted to teach His disciples and us about worship, He went to Samaria, not Jerusalem.  He went to a common community watering well, not the temple.  He had a conversation with an unrighteous, adulterous woman, not a priest.  And what this tells us is that true worship touches everyday life.  And it reminds us that God is seeking after true worshippers, as I said, in the least likely places and from the least worthy people.  The 30,000-foot overview of John 4 begins in controversy.  Verses 1-6 introduces us to a controversy that leads Jesus to depart from Judea.  We’ll get to that in a moment.  Then it moves into a conversation between Jesus and this Samaritan woman.  And then it ends up on a high note with her personal faith conversion, which is a great story in and of itself.

0:06:38.8

But let’s begin in the first six verses here where the Bible tells us that “when Jesus learned that the Pharisees had heard that Jesus was making and baptizing more disciples than John (although Jesus himself did not baptize, but only his disciples),  he left Judea and departed again for Galilee.  And he had to pass through Samaria.”  Now, this controversy arose, and it was sort of ginned up by the Pharisees themselves, who were never friends of Jesus.  And they put the baptism of John against the baptism of Jesus.  And Jesus caught wind of this.  And it says that He left Judea.  The force of the word “left” in the original language suggests He hightailed it out of there.  He had no patience and no time for trivial tiffs between highbrowed religious people.  And He wasn’t about to let the Pharisees drag Him into some controversy about John’s baptism versus His baptism.  He was out of there.  He says, “I’ve got other things to do than to get into your tiff here.”  And the Bible says that He headed out toward Galilee.

0:08:02.1

Now, to get from Judea to Galilee, the shortest route was through Samaria.  Today we know it as the West Bank.  You tune into the international news, and you often hear news about Israel and the West Bank.  That was the region of Samaria.  And Jesus is about to do what nobody else, no other Jew was willing to do at that time, and that was to travel through Samaria because the religious and racial tensions between the Jews and the Samaritans were huge.  Think of the tensions today between Shiite Muslims and Sunni Muslims and you have some sense of the political and religious and ethnic tensions that were between the Jews and the Samaritans.  Or think back between the Catholics and the Protestants in Ireland years ago and the wars that broke out there.  Or even the racial tensions that have existed in our country from the founding of our country.  The Jews despised the Samaritans, and the Samaritans despised the Jews.  And Jews, if they had to go from here to there and the most direct route was through Samaria, they’d say, “Nope, that’s all right.  I’ll add days and miles and hours to my journey, and I’ll go around Samaria before I’d ever step foot in that place, let alone have a conversation with somebody like that.”

0:09:24.0

Well, Jesus wasn’t about to get involved in some religious squabble that the Pharisees had ginned up.  And He is not going to give any credence to the political, religious and ethnic tensions either.  He goes straight through Samaria.  And the Bible tells us that about the sixth hour…according to the Jewish time clock, that was noon time.  The route from Judea to Galilee through Samaria was 70 miles, two and a half days on foot.  And when He arrives at the town of Sychar, “near the field that Jacob had given to his son…Jacob's well was there.”  There was a community watering well.  And in His humanity, He was thirsty.  And He wanted a drink of water.  Verse 7 says, “A woman from Samaria came to draw water [at the same time].  Jesus said to her, ‘Give me a drink.’”  John adds this parenthetically, “(For his disciples had gone away into the city to buy food.)”  I love that.  It paved the way for Jesus to have this conversation with the Samaritan woman, because the disciples might have been a little bit nervous about traveling through Samaria.  Maybe they had given Him some feedback on that.  They go off to buy some food, and Jesus takes the opportunity to have this conversation.

0:10:51.7

Verse 9, “The Samaritan woman said to him, ‘How is it that you, a Jew, ask for a drink from me, a woman of Samaria?’” There was sort of a double barrel shotgun of ethnic and gender and political and religious tension here.  Not only would the Jews not talk to the Samaritans, but a Samaritan woman?  Are you kidding me?  No Jewish man in that culture would lower himself to such a thing except Jesus.  Because just by having the conversation with her, Jesus elevates the status of women.  Not just Samaritan women, but all women.  And make no mistake about it, friends, anywhere Christianity has traveled down through the generations and centuries, it has always elevated the status of women.  And Jesus models it right here.

0:11:45.7

Verse 10, “Jesus answered her, ‘If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, “Give me a drink,” you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.’”  Now, Jesus knows where He wants to go with the conversation, but He is starting where the woman is.  And He wants her to understand, “Somebody special is standing in your presence.  I’m willing to talk to you.  I’m willing to come to your territory and to have this conversation with you.  And I have a special gift that I want to give to you.”  Verse 11, “The woman said to him, ‘Sir, you have nothing to draw water with, and the well is deep.  Where do you get that living water?’”  You know, she is very much on a physical level, and Jesus is trying to take the conversation to a spiritual level.  But her spiritual senses are dulled.  She doesn’t get it.  It takes a while for her to get there.

0:12:43.1

“Are you greater than our father Jacob?  He gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did his sons and his livestock.” This was a common watering well called the Well of Jacob.  People would come there not only to get some water, but to have some conversation in the community.  Maybe even to have that conversation go in the direction of the covenant promises of God.  This was Jacob’s Well.  There’s a lot of history and all of that there.  Jesus said to her, verse 13, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again.  The water that I will give him will become in him,”—listen to this—"a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”  You see how He’s just lifting the conversation to a whole new level.

0:13:34.4

Have you ever been in a conversation with somebody, and they’re just not on the same spiritual frequency as you are?  It’s probably an indication that their spirit is dead.  Her spiritual senses are dull.  More than that, her spirit, that which was created to have a relationship with God, is dead.  She doesn’t get it.  She’s not there.  She’s not tuning into His frequency.

0:13:59.0

Verse 15, “The woman said to him, ‘Sir, give me this water, so that I will not be thirsty or have to come here to draw water.’”  Again, she is a on a very physical kind of level.  And Jesus is still trying to break through.  He’s trying to take the conversation to a new level and to get to the heart of the matter.  And so He changes course here in the conversation.  Verse 16, “Jesus said to her, ‘Go, call your husband, and come here.’   The woman answered him, ‘I have no husband.’ Jesus said to her, ‘You are right in saying, “I have no husband”; for you have had five husbands, and the one you now have is not your husband.  What you have said is true.’”  Now, the quickest way into a person’s heart is through that which causes them the most pain in their life.  You’ll get to the heart of the matter if you touch on somebody’s pain, if you go through the pain portal.  He couldn’t get her to the level of conversation He wanted.  So He shifts gears, and He started talking about the string of failed relationships in her life.  He says, “Go grab your husband,” knowing full well she was living with a man in an adulterous relationship.  And not only that, but she had blown through five husbands before that.  You’ve heard of the good Samaritan, the parable of the good Samaritan?  This was the bad Samaritan.  This woman had broken the commandments of God one failed relationship after another.

0:15:47.2 

Now Jesus has her attention.  Everything gets quiet in the conversation until she breaks the silence and says…And this is the understatement of the year… “Sir, I perceive that you are a prophet.”  Really?  You think so?  And then she does what all of us do when the conversation gets a little too close to that pain in our lives.  She deflects.  She says, “Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you say that in Jerusalem is the place where people ought to worship.”  Jesus just brought up the brokenness in her life, these broken, failed relationship, and she wants to talk about worship?  And she’s bringing up this age-old conversation and controversy between Samaritans and Jews about the place, the proper place of worship.  And she says, “We Samaritans, we’ve worshipped on this mountain,” probably a reference to Mount Gerizim in the northern regions up there near Galilee.

0:16:56.7

This takes us back to a time when Jeroboam was overseeing the northern kingdom.  And Jeroboam was a wicked leader, a wicked king in the Old Testament.  And he made it possible for the Jewish people and the Samaritans…that is the Jews who married into foreigners and into foreign families.  They became half breeds, as the pure Jews would call them…made it possible for them and more convenient for them to worship here.  “Don’t go down to Jerusalem,” Jeroboam said.  “That’s too long of a journey.  And that temple isn’t all that spectacular anyway.”  So Jeroboam built this other place of worship up in the northern area.  Some of you who travel to Israel with us, Tel Dan is part of that area.  And it devolved into a place of synchronized worship, or Jewish Judaism and the paganism of the northern area up there.

0:17:58.7 

She says…it was an age-old argument…“We worship on this mountain.  You worship in Jerusalem.”  But she is deflecting.  She is completely deflecting the conversation here.  And Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father.  You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews.  But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship him.  God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.”  I’m struck by how Jesus so quickly left the subject of her five previous husbands and the man with whom she was currently living.  He never comes back to the subject of her adultery because now He’s in her heart.  He uses (0:19:00.0) the pain to go deeper and to talk about what He really wanted to talk about, and that was true worship, even though she was the one who brought it up in the first place.  But in effect, what Jesus says to her is this- where you worship isn’t nearly as important and how and whom you worship.  Let me say that again.  Where you worship isn’t nearly as important as how and whom.

0:19:33.9

Now, before I explain a little bit further, let me just say this.  It is important that we come to a place of worship like this.  The Bible tells us in Hebrews, “Do not forsake the assembling of yourselves together as the manner of some is.  But encourage one another.  Encourage one another, and all the more as you see the day approaching.”  It is important for the body of Christ, the church, to come together in corporate worship.  But true (0:20:00.1) worship is not about a place as much as it is a person.  And because of some things that changed around the time of Jesus, true worship can happen anywhere.

0:20:13.4

From the beginning God has always desired to dwell with His people.  Let’s start there.  You go all the way back to the beginning, to Genesis, and God walked with Adam in the cool of the day.  Adam and Eve sinned.  They were expelled from the garden.  But soon after God made it possible for even sinful people to dwell with Him.  For a very long time, God chose to dwell in certain places and invited His people under certain conditions to meet with Him there.  I’m thinking of the Tabernacle in the Old Testament, which was kind of a traveling worship facility that Moses used in the wilderness.  Later, the temple was built in Jerusalem, a more permanent place.  And God would dwell in that place.  And the people would go to those places to worship Him.  The exquisite temple Solomon built drew the worshippers of Yahweh to the holy city from near and far away places alike.  And even during Jesus’s time, the Jews would travel up to Jerusalem to the place of worship many, many times through out the year to celebrate the various religious festivals on their calendar.

0:21:22.9

However, with the coming of the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost, things changed.  The New Testament teaches that our bodies are now the temples of the Holy Spirit.  Because the arrival of the Holy Spirit was still future when Jesus was speaking to this woman at the well, He says this.  He says, “the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father.”  The hour is coming, He says.  He is looking forward to that hour when the Holy Spirit would come and change the geography of things.  Now we are the temple of the Holy Spirit.  When the Holy Spirit comes, worshipping God will not be dependent upon a particular place where the Spirit of God dwells because the Holy Spirit will take up residency in every believer in Jesus.  And this makes true worship something that can happen at any time and at any place.

0:22:19.5 

But please let’s not use that as an excuse not to gather together in worship on the first day of the week, which the church has been doing since the 1^st century.  Yes, you can worship God on a mountain.  You can worship God at the ocean.  You can worship God at a lake, at some other beautiful place.  I suppose you could worship God on the golf course.  And some people use that as an excuse not to come to a place like this and worship.  That’s not what Jesus is talking about.  But just as the temple was a traveling worship facility in the Old Testament, now in the New Testament since the day of Pentecost when the Holy Spirit comes and our bodies are the temple of the Holy Spirit, we are a traveling worship center.  And that’s why worship touches every aspect of life, whether we’re at church, at work, at home or at play.  There is never a time when we cannot be worshipping the Lord.  Not worshipping our work or worshipping our play or worshipping our home or even worshipping a physical church, but in these places at anytime, anywhere we can be worshipping the Lord.

0:23:31.8

By the way, twice Jesus uses the phrase “the hour is coming.”  The second time He uses it He adds, “The hour is coming and is now here.”  Interesting language here.  John is the one in his gospels that pays particular attention to time.  “My time is not yet come,” Jesus says on some occasions, or, “Now is the time.”  The idea here is that the time for true worship—listen to this—is both now and not yet.  It’s present, and it’s future.  It’s earthly, and it’s eschatological at the same time.  I know that’s a big word, but there is something more that Jesus is talking about here by “the hour is coming and is now here.”  It’s future, but it’s now.  It’s present.  Both time references also place an exclamation point on the matter of true worship.  What He is saying is that there is always a sense of urgency and divine timing to what God is doing.  And now is the time for true worshippers to worship the true and living God.

0:24:40.2 

Now, how we worship God is just as important if not more important as where.  Because Jesus says to her pointedly, “God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship him in spirit and truth.”   A lot of us have heard that before, but we’re not exactly sure what it means.  What do I do with that?  It’s kind of out of our reach.  John Piper provides, I think, a good interpretation.  He says, “Worship must have heart, and worship must have head.”  I like that.  “Worship must engage your emotions, and worship must engage your thoughts, both at the same time.”  He goes on to say, “Truth without emotion produces dead orthodoxy and a church full of unspiritual fighters.”  I get the impression Piper might have been in a place one time where their orthodoxy and what they believed was spot on, but their hearts were far from God.  And they devolved into unspiritual fighters.  He goes on to say, “Emotion without truth produces empty frenzy and cultivates flaky people who reject the discipline of rigorous thought.”  And then Piper says, “True worship comes from people who are deeply emotional and who love deep and sound doctrine.”

0:26:21.4

Jesus says, “The Father is searching.  He is on a search and rescue mission here.  He is searching for true worshippers who must,”—He uses the word “must”—“must worship Him in spirit and in truth.”  With all of your heart, soul, mind and strength, and, yes, with all of your mind.  Don’t forget that.  Both the head and the heart come together in this thing called true worship.

0:26:53.3

Let’s drill a little bit deeper and start with the heart.  As I was thinking this through this week, I wrote down these words, trying as best as I can to pull together an understanding of this for my own benefit and hopefully for yours as well. Worship must happen in the heart or in the spirit realm, as we often refer to the heart, because by nature God is spirit.  He took on a physical body in the person of Jesus Christ.  However, the real God is spirit.  The real you is spirit.  Your spirit is that which animates your body.  And upon death, here is what happens.  The spirit, the real you, departs from your body.  You’ve probably heard me say it before.  You’re not a physical person who happens to have a spiritual side to you.  You’re a spiritual being that happens to be residing in a physical body.  And one day your spirit, the real you, is going to depart your body.  We call that death.  And that spirit that is the real you that animates your body…when the spirit departs the body upon death, the body lies there in an unanimated state.  You with me so far?

0:28:24.8 

Now, at the moment of salvation the Holy Spirit indwells the believer in Jesus Christ.  Now you have two spirits in you.  You have your spirit, the real you.  And now you have the Holy Spirit inside of you as well, taking up residence. Worship happens in the heart of the true believer when your spirit aligns with the Holy Spirit.  When the Holy Spirit comes inside of you and you’re aligned with Him, the Holy Spirit further animates your body with love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness…all of those Christ-like characteristics.  Your spirit animates your body in a certain way, but the Holy Spirit wants to animate your body through all the character qualities of Christ.  So worship happens in the heart of the believer when your spirit aligns with the Holy Spirit.  Then the Holy Spirit’s animation of the body—listen to this—turns into a refreshing hydration.  Remember Jesus’s reference to living water?  Elsewhere in John 7…go with me there…He not only talks about living water.  He talks about rivers of living water that gush forth from the believer’s inner being.  John 7, Jesus is at one of those festivals in Jerusalem.  One of the annual festivals where they go to worship and celebrate.  And verse 37 says, “On the last day of the feast, the great day, Jesus stood up and cried out, ‘If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink.  Whoever believes in me as the scripture has said, out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.’”  This is just a couple of chapters away in John’s Gospel from the conversation Jesus had with the Samaritan woman at the well where He mentioned the living water.  And now He says it again in front of a huge crowd in Jerusalem.

0:30:34.3

John goes on to say in chapter 7, “Now this he said about the Holy Spirit whom those who believed in him were to receive, for as yet the spirit had not been given because Jesus was not yet glorified.”  What are saying here?  We’re saying that worship must happen from the heart.  And how that happens is when your spirit or my spirit aligns with the Holy Spirit.  And you’re in sync with and you’re in harmony with the Spirit of God who is living inside you by faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.  Other language in the New Testament amplifies this idea of alignment that I’m talking about by suggesting that we walk by the Spirit, we live by the Spirit.  We keep in step with the Spirit.  We’ve yielded ourselves fully to the Spirit.  It’s possible that your spirit is in opposition to the Spirit of God, because the flesh wars against the Spirit and the Spirit wars against the flesh.  But when the alignment comes, then that aspect of true worship that is from the heart produces rivers of living water.  And the emotions come with that.  And the Holy Spirit takes you on a ride.

0:31:51.7

You know, when I see that phrase “the rivers of living water” as applied to the Holy Spirit, I picture myself in one sense kind of floating down a lazy river.  And there is one sense that when you’re aligned with and in step with the Holy Spirit and worshiping God from your heart, the Spirit just takes you on this easy, you know, lazy river kind of thing.  But you know the rapids are coming.  That’s the fun part, right?  That’s the adventuresome part.  There is a part of aligning with the Holy Spirit and flowing with Him that is like an easy lazy river.  But He is also preparing you for the adventure of your life.  And you go on those rapids, and the rush and the gush of living water comes.  And He’s taking you to places you never thought of before in worship, in work, in home, in play, wherever you are.  And I think that’s part of what Jesus has in my mind here when He says, “Those who worship God in spirit and in truth.” Those who worship in spirit are aligning their spirit to the Holy Spirit.  And out of the heart we worship Him.  Make sense?  Are you with me so far?

0:33:07.5

Well, let’s talk about the other side.  Worship must also happen in the head.  It must also happen in the intellectual realm.  Because Jesus said, “True worshippers must worship God in truth.”  In other words, we must be willing to engage in the kind of rigorous thought that leads us to the knowledge of God as He has revealed Himself in scripture.  This brings us back to the second commandment of worship.  You worship God in response to how He has revealed Himself, not in response to how your wild emotions and imaginations take you.  Even that wild ride on the river of living water and the emotions that are involved in that, if it’s not governed by rigorous and disciplined thought from the study of the Word of God and the knowledge of God, then we get off in places of frenzy and, as Piper says, flaky people that are just full of all emotion.  But it’s not based upon the knowledge of God.  It must be head and heart.

0:34:18.5

Jesus also was not afraid, I’ll just toss in here, to speak truth to the Samaritan woman in this conversation.  We worship God from our heads and our intellect by daily renewing our minds with the Word of God.  But Jesus takes it a little bit further, and He says to her, “You worship what you do not know,” verse 22, “we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews.”  Those were fighting words.  Some would say how dare Jesus come into Samaritan territory and say, “Your worship is false, but I know what true worship is all about.”  Our modern sensitivities don’t like this kind of confrontation.  The tolerance police would throw a yellow flag, or referees would.  And you can hear some people like the moral relativists say, “Oh, don’t say that this woman and the way she worships God and how she does it and all that and the god she worships is wrong.  She has the freedom to worship God however she chooses.”  And Jesus would say in so many words, “Yes, she has the right to be wrong.”  I mean, Jesus really pointedly says to her, “You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know.  Salvation is from Jews.”  Two thousand years ago, you try walking into Samaritan territory and saying something like that…again, those are fighting words.  Try saying it at the United Nations today.  Them are fighting words.  But, again, Jesus is just speaking truth.

0:36:15.9

The truth will always insult our intellect when we’re operating on faulty knowledge.  And you want to speak the truth in love but take the risk of truth insulting our less-than intellect.  Later in the upper room Jesus said to His disciples, “I’m the way, the truth, and the life, and no man comes to the Father but by Me.”  He didn’t say that to poke somebody in the chest or poke them in the eye.  He was just speaking truth.  And so it should not surprise us then that true worship also depends on the truth.  And the most loving thing we can do is tell somebody, “You know, what you’re worshiping is false.  It’s not based upon the knowledge of God as He has revealed Himself in scripture.  You may be all full of emotion and heart and may be sincere.  But you’re sincerely wrong, and let me tell you why.  And let me point you to the one true and living God and what true worship is all about.

0:37:15.6

Well, the Samaritan woman knew enough to respond this way.  She says in verse 25 and 26, “‘I know that Messiah is coming (he who is called Christ).  When he comes, he will tell us all things.’ Jesus said to her, ‘I who speak to you am he.’”  You ever heard somebody say, “You know, all that stuff about Christianity that came out of the 1^st century, the disciples just sort of whipped that up and made Jesus to be more than He really was.  He never claimed to be God.  They just said that He claimed to be God, but He never really did that.  It was really more about the disciples trying to make the whole resurrection thing happen and give legs to the early Christianity.”  Well, they haven’t read the Bible.  Jesus couldn’t have been more clear here.  She was talking about the Messiah, the anointed One, and He says, “Yeah, that’s Me.  You’re looking at Him.”

0:38:24.1

Salvation is from the Jews because God’s plan to redeem us started with Abraham.  And furthermore, the Bible says that the Messiah would be a descendant from the line of King David.  This was common knowledge even among the Samaritans.  And Jesus couldn’t have been more clear in what He said here, not only about where to worship, but more importantly, how and whom to worship.

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Well, the response…I mean, He has clearly got her attention.  And I don’t have time to read through the rest of the story here, but the disciples come back into the scene.  And they’re kind of wondering what is going on here.  And the woman runs off to her village.  She leaves her water pot behind.  You know, she was so concerned about physical things and just about day-to-day things.  And Jesus keeps trying to get her to think about higher things, and He finally gets her there.  And she’s so dialed in now, she forgets the water pot.  She runs back to her village, and she tells everybody.  “You’ve got to come meet this guy.  He told me things that nobody has ever told me.  He knew things about me that not very many people know.”  And the Bible says in verse 39, “Many Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman's testimony.  They said to the woman,” verse 42, “‘It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is indeed the Savior of the world.’”  Wow, what a conversion.  It started in controversy.  He guides her through this conversation.  And it ends up in the conversion of this woman’s heart.

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The Father is seeking after true worshippers, not false worshippers.  Not frenzied worshippers, but true worshippers who will worship Him in spirit and in truth.  And the Father found one that day, the Samaritan woman who then went and told other people.  And when they came, they found everything that she had to say to be true.  And many people, many Samaritans in that village were converted.

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Are you a true worshipper of God?  Don’t let your modern sensitivities for tolerance and this or that shield you from hearing the truth spoken in love.  Truth is important.  You don’t want to base your life on falsehoods and lies and deceptions.  The Bible says the devil is the father of lies.  And he is an angel of light.  He’ll do everything he can to disguise what true worship is all about.  But Jesus takes all the masks and the disguises off.  He says, “I am He.  I am He.”  Worship in spirit and in truth, with your heart, with your head.  And be all in with God as you worship Him.

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